not really. its just sort of sad he cant find a way to make a movie that satisfies both. why does he have to keep them seperate? cant he make an interesting movie he thinks people might actually want to see?

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Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

School Of Rock, yes. Newton Boys, no. Hopefully, Bad News Bears will be more like the former (and I've never seen the original). The combined brilliance of Waking Life and Before Sunset justifies any commercial excursions in my mind, and with Scanner Darkly coming next year and the movie he's making over ten years with Ethan Hawke, I say he's good to go.

The Newton Boys was his own pet project. I hear the movie's not great, but it was his idea, his development, and then he got studio funding.

School of Rock doesn't seem like a sell-out movie to me. It's a bigger movie than Linklater usually does, but I just don't see any sell-out element to it. If you had Jack Black attached to a Mike White screenplay... well, I'd jump at the chance to direct that. The movie was good, too.

So I see Linklater as always doing his own thing and simply ignoring the "boundaries" of the studio/independent system. That's admirable.

i watched Slacker tonight, without knowing much about it other than how it was distributed (care of SPike, Mike, etc.) and that it was Kevin Smiths inspiration to get off his ass and make Clerks. from the opening i was surprised at how good it looked considering my impression it was very lowbudget and therefore would probably 'look' like shit even if it was good. i was interested in the film for the first 20 minutes and even with it for the first hour.

but by the time i hit the hour mark, i realized it seemed LONG. he took a neat concept for a 20 minute short and padded it out for an hour and a half and it just didnt have anything to go on. like waking life, for ME, there is just NOTHING to grab onto. dozens of (mostly) unrelated characters drifting in and out but it never GOES anywhere. and the way EVERYONE talks through linklaters voice just gets old way before the running time is up. does EVERY person in austin have to talk like some pseudo-intellectual about all these grand philosophical ideas like some college student? it just gets on my nerves. the ending was nice, though.

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Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

Sometimes, the worst thing that can happen to a director is success. Look at Soderbergh -- he maintained his integrity up until Oceans 11, and now he's doing Oceans 12. With School of Rock grossing 100 million, Linklater is now in the big leagues, and he needs to be careful. Doing a remake of Bad News Bears is one move closer to joining the dark side. School of Rock was a decent, entertaining film, but it certainly wasn't the work of an auteur. It has all the earmarks of a Scott Rudin production, in which everything is slick and upbeat and geared for a large mainstream audience.

A cautionary tale is Demme's career -- he was one of the most unique filmmakers in Hollywood until Silence of the Lambs, and now he squanders his talent on uninspired genre pieces.

The original Bad News Bears is pretty good. It was pretty much the first realistic film about Little League. Then there were the sequels, Bad News Bears in Breaking Training and Bad News Bears Go To Japan (both without Matthau's involvement). Will those sequels be remade as well.